The Huawei Mate 20 Pro is the newest camera beast in town, a phone with three cameras on its back that give you unprecedented freedom to shoot. But how does the Mate 20 Pro camera compare against two of the best cameraphones around, the Apple iPhone XS Max and the Samsung Galaxy Note 9?

First, let's get the specs out of the way: on the Mate 20 Pro we have a main, 40-megapixel f/1.8 shooter, a secondary, 20-megapixel ultra-wide angle, 16mm lens, and a third, 8-megapixel telephoto camera with 3X zoom for an equivalent of 80mm focal reach. The iPhone XS Max and the Galaxy come with dual rear cameras, a 12MP main one and a 12MP telephoto one on both phones, and both cameras have optical image stabilization.

With all this handy knowledge in mind, let's take a look at the actual photos, shall we?

1. London 101, The Gherkin

One of our favorite buildings in London, The Gherkin, officially known as 30 St Mary Axe, is an egg-shaped skyscraper that peeks through the old Victorian buildings and provides that contrast between new and old, modern and traditional.

2. Zoom in (2x)

The Mate 20 Pro comes with a native telephoto lens with 3x zoom, but most other phones out there ship with a 2x optical zoom, so we decided to focus on the 3x and 5x zoom capabilities of the Mate later on and first compare how images zoomed in two times compare. We first have the image and then, a 100% crop so that you can take a closer look at the resolved detail.

3. The Shard

The Shard is a tall pyramid that rises high and almost seems to pierce the London sky. The view from the inside is really something special, but here we take a picture of it from the other side of the Thames river.

7. Seflie time

Of course, I had to take a couple of selfies at those places. Notice the difference in color and how some phones are doing a better job than others at keeping the background details that are so important here.

8. One more selfie

And one more selfie. Here, the Mate obviously couldn't focus perfectly, but I took three different shots hoping and none of them was in perfect focus, so it is what it is. Notice the differences and see which one you like better.

Final Words

Finally, it's clear that the Mate 20 Pro delivers with a great camera.

We still need to use it a lot more to get a better idea of how it performs, but this first test showed promise. Did it match the iPhone XS Max with its incredible new Smart HDR function? We still like the colors from the iPhone a bit better, but often times we would take an image from the Mate 20 Pro over one from the Galaxy Note 9.

What about you? Which of these phone cameras you liked best? Let us know in the comments right below!

Even though my P20 Pro will be gone once this bad boy gets released, I just hope for the sake of P20 owners, that Huawei pushes an update that fixes the overexposed selfies. I didn't have high hopes for the front camera on the Mate 20, but I'm glad they finally addressed it.

From my experience, it has been better than Samsung's tbh. My P20 is running the latest 154 update with September's security patch. The past month and so, I received 3 updates in total. The camera keeps on improving, which was already great, they added gpu turbo, battery life has been crazy good, and DJ has few screenshots that I sent him few weeks ago that backs those claims.
I bought my P20 Pro thinking that I'm going to use it for few days or weeks at max, enjoy it's camera and hate the rest of it, then switch back to a Samsung phone or the Pixel 2 XL, but here I am, loving my P20 Pro and only ditching it for the Mate 20 Pro.
I just wish tech reviewers are more fair when comparing these phones, because they don't get the love they deserve.

Basically if you want to take a picture of clouds, buy an iPhone. Else you'll lose them.

If you want to take a picture of things, find the camera with the colour temperature you like. Very little between N9 and M20 for me. Just down to colour, as I say. Difficult to know without being there, but I'd say M20 is most true to life.

So sick of cameras on phones these days. The colors are all over the place. Why are these three 3 cameras so vastly different with color reproduction. I guess no one wants realism any more. You really do need to use a dslr to compare PA.

I mean take the first shot - you might think the note 9 is way too cold and boring but it may have been the most accurate and the other two were just messing with the colors. Probably the case knowing these 3.

LoL, you can definitely recover shadows(even from jpeg's).
What you can't recover is clipped areas where the information is lost.

What Smart HDR does is expose for the highlights and overly brighten the shadows. In a lot of images it looks nice(it's very dramatic) but is definitely not a realistic look. And honestly the warm color balance on the iPhones is off most of the time.

This is not true. You are actually always supposed to shoot under not over. You can recover from dark areas by increasing exposure. The information is still there. You can't recover detail from over exposed areas because the information is lost.

Shadows are recoverable but you lose image detail (a camera's sensor stores less information in the blacks than the whites).

What you SHOULD do for correct exposure and maximum post edit capability is to ETTR (expose to the right). This is to say you should expose so that you are just under the clipped highlights limit, and then in post processing you can easily reduce the whites whilst having maximum information in the blacks.

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